Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i The Texas Observer

Beating Bohac My thanks for the Observer’s political coverage. Christopher Collins’ piece caught my eye (“Two Democratic Primary Hopefuls Run Afoul of State Labor Group,” January 31, texasobserver.org). I’m a longtime independent progressive activist. Among other things, I’m part of the Indivisible group that protests outside Senator John Cornyn’s Houston office every Tuesday, rain or shine. I happen to live in House District 138 and support Adam Milasincic’s candidacy. The AFL-CIO made a grave mistake in dissing Adam and backing his opponent. It’ll take a strong progressive to defeat longtime far-right incumbent Dwayne Bohac, one of the most destructive Lege members. I’ve met with Adam and stay in touch with him. He listens and takes advice. He’s the real deal. Adam has worked for free, pro bono, to represent hurricane…

In March, the SXSW festival brought about 500,000 people to party and schmooze at the 31st-annual mega-conference in Austin. Which of the following was not at SXSW this year? a. A 6 a.m. “cuddly goat yoga sesh” featuring a DJ and gold body paintingb. Homeless Hotspots, a “charitable experiment” that turned homeless residents into walking wifi vendorsc. A panel hosted by a professional clairvoyant, titled “Get Woke: A Psychic Guide to Affect Social Change”d. “Disruptive Tech in Your Home Cannabis Kitchen” ANSWER: b. In 2012, BBH Labs and the Front Steps homeless shelter teamed up to outfit homeless Austinites with 4G MiFi devices at SXSW. Festivalgoers could pay $2 for 15 minutes of internet.…

TITLE/ORGANIZATION Co-founder, Frac Tech Services THE CAUSE Sanctifying Texas conservatism with boatloads of cash. NOTABLE ACCOMPLISHMENT Along with his brother, Dan, he has pumped nearly $3 million into Texas campaigns since July. ALLIES Empower Texans, Texas Right to Life, Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day MONEY QUOTE “Maybe it’s time to wrap up some things, maybe it’s time to move on to the next 1,000 years.” ON THE MORNING OF October 21, Farris Wilks, a North Texas fracking billionaire, was busy with matters of eschatology. Preaching at the Eastland County church founded by his father, Wilks explained to his congregation — the idiosyncratic, nondenominational Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day — that neither heaven nor hell awaited them when they died. According to Biblical revelation, they would “simply go to the grave…

WITHIN HOURS OF THE VERdict, the calls for Senator Carlos Uresti to resign came quickly from the 10 other Democrats in the Texas Senate. In February, a San Antonio jury convicted Uresti on 11 felony counts of fraud and money laundering stemming from his role in defrauding investors in an oil field services company that was functionally a Ponzi scheme. During the trial, which dominated the news in San Antonio but seemed curiously ignored in Austin, prosecutors showed how Uresti, an attorney who has served in the Legislature for 21 years, used his office to wheedle unsuspecting investors into pouring money into a cockamamie scheme to sell fracking sand. Uresti faces disbarment and up to 100 years in prison. He’s also preparing to defend himself in another skeezy affair. Uresti…

IN JUNE 2015, BLAKE NORTON WENT TO SEE HER doctor for a routine prenatal check-up. She was 11 weeks pregnant — just before she’d begin to show — and she and her husband, Weston, were overjoyed. It would be their first child, very much a wanted pregnancy. But as her OB-GYN reviewed the ultrasound, the doctor frowned. There was no heartbeat. Norton’s body hadn’t signaled that it had stopped two weeks earlier — what’s known as a “missed miscarriage,” or “missed abortion.” At her doctor’s suggestion, Norton, in shock, scheduled a procedure for the next day to remove the tissue from inside her uterus. Her doctor was affiliated with Seton Medical Center Austin, so Norton made an appointment there. The well-regarded hospital is the largest medical and surgical acute care…

walking back to the housethe grey sky of a grey day’s dusklined, curved, with deep foldsslows my pace too many days of too little sunand we stop looking at thenuances of grey, but tonightwalking back to the house in a quietI could spoon into a dishno cows, no horses, no distanttrain or highway this folded sky consoles mea flannel sheet for a sleeping worldand yes, a dish of quietbefore slipping into bed. Jim LaVilla-Havelin is poetry editor for the San Antonio Express-News. His fifth book of poems, WEST, was published by Wings Press last year.…

I APPRECIATED CHRISTOPHER COLLINS’ INSIGHTFUL article (“The 7 Most Pressing Issues Facing Rural Texas,” December 7, texasobserver.org). You may have passed through Anson on visits to the Abilene area. I graduated from Anson High in 1959. It was a bustling, busy county seat when I lived there. The shops around the courthouse were all open — multiple cafes, banks, dry goods and grocery stores. When I last visited, most were closed. Some shops on the square (now a traffic circle) were only storefronts. The Palace Theater was practically in ruins. Anson could be a charming town like Wimberley or Fredericksburg. But it is now so sad. Most of my classmates left. Of my eight closest girlfriends, only one stayed. She had a business and land. I had hoped, with three…

HURRICANE HARVEY WAS DESTRUCTION IN THREE ACTS. The first occurred on August 25, when the storm crashed ashore north of Corpus Christi with 130 mph winds. For its second act, Harvey lingered over the Texas coast for days, disgorging an unprecedented amount of rain that turned Houston into a lake, before drifting out into the Gulf. Janice Rogers faced Harvey’s third and final act when the storm swung back for a second landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border on August 30. Rogers, 57, waded through waist-deep water outside her west Port Arthur apartment to reach a helicopter that flew her to safety. After she slept in a shelter for two days, someone convinced her to board a military plane sending evacuees to Dallas. Rogers, born and raised in Port Arthur, hasn’t…

THE TERM Seasteading WHO’S USING IT Susanna Dokupil, Silicon Valley investors, libertarians This primary season, Governor Greg Abbott forced Texans into proximity with an idea suitable only for the bubble of Silicon Valley: Seasteading. What in the heck is that, you ask? Allow Joe Quirk, president of the San Francisco-based Seasteading Institute, to explain. “If you could have a floating city, it would essentially be a start-up country,” Quirk told the New York Times in November. “We can create a huge diversity of governments for a huge diversity of people.” Inspired yet? The dream, in sum, is to build autonomous floating countries in ocean waters currently controlled by no nation, in order to escape the clutches of laws, taxes and the tyranny of rubbing shoulders with one’s lessers. As an…

GateHouse is a bottom-feeder — it buys papers, strips them of assets for quick cash, fires everybody, gives its executives big bonuses and moves on to the next set of bones to pick clean. In March, the Austin American-Statesman announced that it was being sold by its corporate parent, Cox Media Group, to an ill-regarded New York company called GateHouse Media. Cox treated the Statesman poorly in recent years, laying off reporters and ensuring that the paper contains yesterday’s news by outsourcing its printing to San Antonio. But GateHouse is a bottom-feeder — it buys profitable local papers, strips them of assets for quick cash, fires a significant portion of the staff, gives its executives big bonuses and moves on to the next set of bones to pick clean. The…

JUST A SMALL CORRECTION TO YOUR EDITORIAL (“Here Comes #2018,” February issue), in which you write, “In the sense of living under remarkably persistent one-party rule, Texas is Turkmenistan with better roads.” A year or so ago I spent a couple of weeks in Turkmenistan, and I can assure you that their roads are as good as if not better than Texas’ FM roads. Ashgabat does a better job of trying to keep the general population economically content than Austin does, although not as much as it did in the past. Texas gives us circuses while Turkmenistan gives its people bread. You’re going to have to compare Texas to someplace like Cambodia if you want Texas to look good. Sound Off editors@texasobserver.org or comment on Facebook.com/texasobserver and texasobserver.org…

AT AROUND MIDNIGHT ON PRIMARY NIGHT IN DALLAS, Lisa Luby Ryan was flanked by two leaders of Texans for Vaccine Choice, arms raised, cheering. “We just got a call from Representative [Jason] Villalba, who conceded to us and wished us well,” said Ryan, the far-right challenger to the GOP incumbent. Jackie Schlegel, executive director of Texans for Vaccine Choice, and Rebecca Hardy, its state policy director, wore Ryan campaign shirts and huge grins. “Victory!” they shouted. Schlegel’s feud with Villalba began in 2015, when the Dallas Republican filed legislation, ultimately unsuccessful, to eliminate nonmedical “conscience exemptions” for vaccination in public schools. A mother who says one of her kids was injured by vaccines, Schlegel created the now-influential group, which she argues is not anti-vaccine but pro-parental rights. In the months…

IN EARLY MARCH, ED DRUSINA AND ROBERTO FERNANDO Salmón Castelo sat at the back of an almost empty auditorium with plates of food, talking amiably and struggling with plastic knives to cut chicken smothered in a red mystery sauce. The two men are the U.S. and Mexican commissioners of the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), a little-known binational agency that carries out the provisions of U.S.-Mexico water treaties. They had spent the morning giving speeches about the state of the beleaguered Colorado River to a group of academics gathered at the El Paso water utility’s learning center for a summit on shared water resources along the border. Proud of their latest accomplishment, an agreement to share the Colorado River during drought and to fund conservation measures in Mexico, the…

COMAL COUNTY // A state district judge told jurors that God said he should intervene. The Herald-Zeitung reports that Judge Jack Robison said, “When God tells me I gotta do something, I gotta do it,” as he urged jurors to find Gloria Romero-Perez not guilty of sex trafficking. Nevertheless, the jury returned a guilty verdict, and Robison is now under investigation by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. His attorney said that the judge “acknowledged what he did was improper but said he was at peace with it because he was directed by God to deliver the message.” CARROLLTON // Thieves purloined a life-size dummy from a chicken restaurant, then had second thoughts. Affectionately called the Cowboy by the staff of Babe’s Chicken Dinner House, the gray-haired, denim-clad, strong-and-silent type…

BY MOST MEASURES, MCALLEN’S 2015 CHRISTMAS PARADE AND concert was a wild success. Telenovela stars, radio personalities and local dignitaries waved to cheering crowds from an impressive line of lighted floats that glided through the streets of this city of 142,000 in the Rio Grande Valley. Fourteen marching bands strutted their stuff. Towering over the festivities were larger-than-life balloons: Santa Claus, the Gingerbread Man and Angry Birds characters. ¶ In a major entertainment coup, the city had secured a top-shelf headliner: Latin pop sensation Enrique Iglesias. Bailamos! crooned Iglesias, before turning his microphone to the mob of fans to finish the song’s chorus: Let the rhythm take you over, bailamos! Iglesias high-fived attendees and pulled fans onstage to sing along with him in the high-energy performance. A huge crowd, estimated…